Terraform with Nutanix Provider

I like to keep things simple because I think simple is easy to understand. In college I had an instructor that always told the class K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid). Anyway, this weekend I started to play with Terraform and the Nutanix Provider for the first time. My goal was to build a simple main.tf that anyone could understand and use as a template for learning. Below is my main.tf working with Terrafrom 0.11.3 and Nutanix Provider 1.0.0. This main.tf creates a simple CentOS VM and uses cloud-init for user data. This main.tf connects to Nutanix Prism Central rather than Prism Element.

Review Docs https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/nutanix/index.html

Install Terraform

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install wget unzip
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.11.13/terraform_0.11.13_linux_amd64.zip
sudo unzip ./terraform_0.11.13_linux_amd64.zip -d /usr/local/bin/

Create the main.tf and .conf file for cloud-init.  If you don’t want to use cloud-init then comment out guest_customization_cloud_init_user_data.  In the below example mine is called devmin.conf.

Example main.tf

provider "nutanix" {
  username = "admin"
  password = "XXXXXXX"
  endpoint = "127.0.0.1"
  insecure = true
  port     = 9440
}

#uuid of target cluster VM is to be deployed on
data "nutanix_cluster" "cluster" {
   cluster_id = "0005842b-4b74-b4fb-0000-000000014a60"
}

#change count to deploy number of VMs
resource "nutanix_virtual_machine" "devmin-terraform-deploy" {
 count= "1"
 name = "devmin-terraform-deploy-${count.index + 1}"
 description = "devmin-terraform-deploy"
 num_vcpus_per_socket = 4
 num_sockets          = 1
 memory_size_mib      = 4096

#cloud-init
guest_customization_cloud_init_user_data ="${base64encode("${file("devmin.conf")}")}"

cluster_reference = {
     kind = "cluster"
     uuid = "${data.nutanix_cluster.cluster.cluster_id}"
     }

#vlan from acli net.list
nic_list = [{
   subnet_reference = {
     kind = "subnet"
     uuid = "0f4ece03-7d4f-4303-b36d-80493150847d"
      }
      }]

#gold/master disk image from acli image.list
disk_list = [{
   data_source_reference = [{
     kind = "image"
     uuid = "08c16f61-1f83-4884-8215-70bcc57bac8f"
       }]
       }]

}

Try it out
In the directory where main.tf exists run the below.  Note: that “terraform init” will download the Nutanix Provider.

terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

About the Author: devmin

systems architect with interest in automation, k8s, linux, devops, bash, real estate, anonymity

1 Comment

  1. I am doing terraform for AWS and GCP for a while, but recently I joined a new company which use Nutanix. This really helped me but I got question here. How can we manage terraform states in Nutanix?.

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